Ford Motors first implemented Six Sigma in the late 1990s to address issues like high defect rates of over 20,000 opportunities for defects per vehicle. Their approach, called "consumer driven six sigma", aimed to reduce defects to just one per 14.8 vehicles. Six Sigma helped Ford eliminate over $2.19 billion in waste over the last decade and save over $1 billion through their quality improvement projects in the early 2000s. However, implementing Six Sigma at Ford also faced obstacles like skepticism from employees and the costs and time required for training.

1. Six Sigma of
Ford Motors
Group No. 5
Anamika Kumari
Krishnakali Jana
Richa Singh
Sagnik Chaudhuri
Varun Jaitly

2. Overview of Company
• Founded by Henry Ford on 16 June, 1903.
• Headquartered in Dearborn, Michigan.
• Company sells many cars under its brand ranging from hatchbacks to
SUV’s, Sports cars to luxury cars.
• Is part of a joint venture in countries like Russia, China, Singapore etc and
owns stake in Aston martin and other brands as well.
• Listed in NYSE, ford family is minority stake holder but holds majority
voting power.
• Known to be world’s first automaker to use Six Sigma.
• Ford was the eleventh-ranked overall American-based company in the
2018 Fortune 500 list, based on global revenues in 2017 of $156.7 billion.
In 2008, Ford produced 5.532 million automobiles and employed about
213,000 employees at around 90 plants and facilities worldwide.

3. What is Six Sigma ?
• Six Sigma (6σ) is a set of techniques and tools for process improvement. It
was introduced by American engineer Bill Smith while working
at Motorola in 1986. Jack Welch made it central to his business strategy
at General Electric in 1995. A six-sigma process is one in which 99.99966% of
all opportunities to produce some feature of a part are statistically expected
to be free of defects.
• Six Sigma strategies seek to improve the quality of the output of a process by
identifying and removing the causes of defects and minimizing
impact variability in manufacturing and business processes.
• It uses a set of quality management methods, mainly empirical, statistical
methods, and creates a special infrastructure of people within the
organization who are experts in these methods. Each Six Sigma project
carried out within an organization follows a defined sequence of steps and
has specific value targets, for example: reduce process cycle time, reduce
pollution, reduce costs, increase customer satisfaction, and increase profits.

4. Doctrine of Six Sigma
Six Sigma doctrine asserts:
Continuous efforts to achieve
stable and predictable process
results (e.g., by reducing
process variation) are of vital
importance to business
success.
Manufacturing and business
processes have characteristics
that can be defined,
measured, analyzed,
improved, and controlled.
Achieving sustained quality
improvement requires
commitment from the entire
organization, particularly from
top-level management.
Features that set Six Sigma
apart from previous quality-
improvement initiatives
include:
A clear focus on achieving
measurable and quantifiable
financial returns from any Six
Sigma project.
An increased emphasis on
strong and passionate
management leadership and
support.
A clear commitment to making
decisions based on verifiable
data and statistical methods,
rather than assumptions and
guesswork.

5. METHODOLOGIES
This Photo by Unknown Author is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND

6. DMAIC DMADV
2 METHODOLOGIES

7. D
M
A
I
C

8. DMADV

9. Core Six Sigma
Principles
Always focus on the customer
Understand how work really happens
Make your processes flow smoothly
Reduce waste and concentrate on value
Stop defects through removing variation
Make your efforts systematic and scientific

10. Why Six Sigma necessary for Ford
COST REDUCTION IMPROVING QUALITY POOR CUSTOMER
SATISFACTION RATES
LOWERING ENVIRONMENTAL
IMPACT BY REDUCING
SOLVENT CONSUMPTION

11. Ford’s
approach to
six sigma
The Ford Motor Company began to use the six-
sigma strategy in the late 90’s.
The company called their approach towards
achieving these goals as consumer driven six
sigma.
One of the major problem faced by Ford at that
time was the 20,000 plus opportunities for
defects while making their cars.
Their aim was to reduce their defect rate to
single defect per every 14.8 vehicles, and they
succeeded.

12. Obstacles
• Employee commitment :-Many
employees at Ford viewed six Sigma
with skepticism. This resulted in the
lack of commitment of the
employees.
• Time, money and productivity :-
Explaining the employees about six
Sigma required time and employee's
training was costly. Also, employees
become less productive.
• Requirement of data :- Since ford
was new to six Sigma and six Sigma
required vast amount of data, ford
needed to implement new
measurement systems to fulfill their
needs

13. Criticism in six
sigma process
Challenges with people
 Low Information
Resistance to change
No management Buy-in

14. Challenges In
Implementation
Incorrect scope
Lack of Resources
Change is hard

15. Ford’s success in Six
Sigma implementation
• It helped in eliminating more than 2.19 billion waste over last
decade
• Ford’s six sigma methodologies for quality improvement and
waste elimination were big steps.
• Consumer Driven Six sigma saved over a billion dollars
worldwide approximately 10000 improvement projects in early
2000s.
• Some of the deep-rooted problems were also solved like
inadequate productivity, poor use of resources, low customer
satisfaction, and environmental unfriendliness.

16. THANK YOU